Serpent's Eyes
by Aine Deande
Summary: A short vignette. Severus Snape's eyes resemble dark tunnels... and as a veil of darkness is lifted, we are allowed to take a peek into the world behind his eyes.


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A/N: Hello everyone... Malu speaking here. Small intro: I am female, Dutch, 16, tall, blonde... Oh wait, this isn't a personal ad. Anyway, back to topic. This is the first fanfic I've posted on ff.net, however it is not by far the first I've ever written. I have been converted long before now, I'm afraid. :) This qualifies as sort of a vignette that I wrote in the middle of the night, as I couldn't sleep and my mind tends to take me places in the darkness that it doesn't normally go in the daylight. Hence the birth of this short story. I hope you like it basically, it is about Severus' eyes; and what lies behind them. Dark, dark tunnels. 

Please read and review, I would very much appreciate it. 

Serpent's Eyes

His eyes make you think of dark pools, of tunnels.

Zoom in on the eyes. Everywhere within these tunnels it is dark, it is damp, it is soundless and the air holds no taste or smell except for that odd humidity. But someplace off in the distance the darkness grows a little lighter. There sits a boy who wants to play.

Look closer, now.

There sits a boy in the grass and he is playing with his toys. The boy is young. The boy wears simple clothing. Clothes that could get dirty if he wanted them to, and he would have permission.

This boy never does anything without permission.

His eyes make you think of dark waters.

The light comes in, and more is revealed. Come now, into this zone of light before us, let us observe the scene.

The boy has toys. There are three toys: one is a replication of a serpent, it hisses and slithers like the real thing would. Its sinuous skin glints silver in the half-light permeating the scene.

One is a lion's head: this toy has been battered throughout the years and is despised by the snake, and set aside from the rest a little. The corners of the lion's mouth point downward, making his face adopt a pitiful expression at which the serpent hisses. The boy watches with pursed lips and says nothing.

A voice calls from somewhere deep in the darkness, penetrates the still air smoothly like a needle coursing through water. 

Inside the boy's eyes a door closes, a light goes out without much protest, fire dying before it has had a chance to burn.

The voice's owner is the boy's mother.

The boy's mother is now dead.

The scene before us fades to black, and we see nothing within these concrete walls, the green grass of the tunnel no longer distinguishable as the blackness swallows all colours, absorbs them with practised ease.

It is possible that black is a solely selfish colour. It is not possible, however, that the boy we just saw is so. This boy will give from his battered heart with its corners pointing downward as the taker hisses orders until he can give no more. Until he is wrung out. Until the light in his eyes is dead, and his eyes have become endless and dark tunnels, with no depth other than inward and no way out, no solution, no absolution.

Not until the boy that was before us has become a man, of black robes and cold voice and hard eyes, seeing nothing of the light around him, not willing to absorb it, not knowing how.

Blind to the ache in his chest as his luck ran out.

I never did tell you what the third toy was. You probably didn't see it for yourself; he kept it securely tugged away in the crook of his bent arm. And the darkness cloaked what little remnant of light remained. 

Yet, still. What little information we have must be obtained, and must be divulged for us to understand this man, this boy, with eyes dark as pools, deeper than down.

It was a doll.

Look closer, now.

It was a puppet.

Closer. . .

And on its face were painted two tears, rare as diamonds, shaped small as little hearts, red as though he were shedding blood instead of sorrow.

A snake sheds its skin every other time.

The tears upon the puppet's cheeks were the only spots of colour on its face.

It is said that the heart merely resembles two tears, upside down. Pointing downward.

A tunnel, when long enough, has no beginning or end. It goes ever on, forward, backward, inward, there is no other sense of direction.

His world was ever the same. The corners of his mouth remained, each and every day, pointed downward, like two tears dangling from the ends of a straight line.

He never hid his heart under his tongue.

And as his eyes closed to the world, his tunnels grew darker, wider and deeper, and further away, longer and stretching on, so that the tiny spark of hopeful light at the end of it would not be revealed. 

Tucked away, in the crook of a bent tunnel.

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His eyes make you think of dark pools... of tunnels.

And inside the tunnels, the walls cry.

_FIN_


End file.
